IN BRIEF. Worth reading.

Legacies Of Women-loving Women

September 01, 1999|By Cassandra West. Compiled by Cassandra West.

To Believe in Women

Lillian Faderman

Houghton Mifflin

434 pages, $30

Faderman, a professor at California State University at Fresno, makes a case, based on letters and journals, that many of the early feminist leaders who "were in the forefront of the battle to procure the rights and privileges that large numbers of Americans enjoy today" were, in fact, lesbians. Such lifestyles, she argues, "freed these pioneering women to pursue education, professions and civil and social rights for themselves and others." Many of the women in this survey are obscure but others, such as suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, social reformer Jane Addams and politician Barbara Jordan, loom large on the American cultural landscape, and we know them well for the civic contributions they made, less for the private lives they lived.